I strongly feel that an app like this is not appropriate or beneficial to the public.
Notifying people of safety issues effectively? Very admirable and wonderful.
Offering bounties to track down individuals as a private organization? It just comes off as rocky to me, perhaps unethical, and ripe for abuse and mistakes.
> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote.
> “Let’s find this guy, activate safety network completely,” Frame wrote, according to screenshots of internal Slack messages obtained by The Verge. “This is a great transition of Citizen back to active safety. We are not a news company. We are safety and we make this sort of heinous crime impossible to escape from. That needs to be our mindset.” The bounty was later raised to $30,000.
> However Frame first saw the false identification, the Slack messages show he saw it as an “opportunity” for Citizen to fulfill its “true mission.”
> “We know the guy is out there,” said one host, according to Castle. “We need our users to get out there and bring this guy to justice.”
> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote.
These are scary quotes. The Citizen [app] CEO apparently wants to reframe their company as some sort of vigilante justice machine instead of a simple crime alert app. And he's willing to throw money at it. Of course their first push for vigilante justice is against the wrong person.
Given that The Verge has obtained company Slack transcripts, I assume some of the employees are pushing back from the inside. Let's hope the employees continue fighting against this.
> In the hours that followed, it became clear the app was mistaken. The man pictured had no connection to the fires, and once he was located by law enforcement, he was quickly released for lack of evidence.
"Released for lack of evidence" sounds like he was arrested which can show up on arrest records in background checks. IANAL but if this individual gets a job offer that's later rescinded after a background check due to that arrest, that sounds like grounds for a libel lawsuit. The CEO also put up the money himself, so whatever safe harbor exception Citizen could have claimed is probably unworkable (again, IANAL in bold letters).
Because it's the sort of mentality America was founded on. Not trying to be political, though I'm sure this can be an unpleasant topic. A couple hundred years of, "you're responsible for defending your land and it's your right to defend it," has fascinating and, often, disastrous outcomes.
Add to that a conservatism that treats the constitution like a religious text designed to curtail any kind of societal evolution or transformation as circumstances change.
Big difference between an individual defending his property/family with his own property vs funneling that defense through a corporate crowd-sourced surveillance system.
I agree there is a difference, though I'm not sure it's big. It's a natural evolution of individual efforts to coalesce into a group effort. That's the history of humanity.
Right, but banding together in mobs tends to precede the establishment of a state with laws, due process etc. Hence why we tend to be appalled by vigilantes (even the professionals do a pretty uneven job when it comes to enforcing our laws, letting everyone do it as a hobby is not likely to produce a better result?)
Citizen and all other private security firms operate under the same laws as any other individual or company. It’s not like these guys went out and started committing violent felonies...
The existing local police is a coalesced group effort. In some regions (like SF) the existing institutions are no longer effective. There is nothing surprising or particularly heinous about an attempt to create alternatives.
The idea of property being defended by an individual is the myth. The reality was that, on the frontier, property was defended by the community. It wasn't just you, standing there with your musket, fending off the hordes of "injuns" and "rustlers" all by your lonesome. It was you and your posse.
I think the vigilantism implicitly endorsed by Citizen is entirely typical of the historical American attitude towards how one should defend their property. Moreover, it speaks to the breakdown of law and order in California that an app that organizes a modernized form of "frontier justus" can find enough traction to get off the ground.
I don't think this speaks much of California given that it was founded in New York years ago. It just so happens that this incident took place in one of the most populous places in the US, but I wouldn't rush to imply causation.
Some people in the US do not consider vigilantism to be antisocial behavior.
For example, in my neighborhood a few people freaked out over a guy going through people's trash cans (trash cans are located in the alley, so not on anyone's property). This involved lots of internet sturm und drang, with people arguing whether or not it's legal to shoot someone going through your trash.
It’s... trash. While it’s not an elegant thing to dig through trash, what’s wrong with someone doing it? You threw it away which means you don’t care what happens to it, right?
It can be but this person was searching for cans not identity theft or stalker stuff. Also: if they were sniffing around for that stuff, killing them on public property when they pose no immediate threat to you or anyone else isn’t the answer.
I dunno, maybe it's because the state itself is not much better? To some degree, if some asshole falsely accuses you, at least you have the grounds for a civil suit where the judiciary is a true neutral party and be recompensed. Whereas when the state via its law enforcement does something bad to you the judiciary isn't truly neutral, the best you can hope for is for it to try to be.
Fuck yeah, this is awesome. I’ve always wanted local enforcement that is decoupled from the nonsense that the police do.
Instead of SFPD, I could have my neighborhood served by high end local security that’s more responsive to local needs. We’ll just cut our spend if they’re douches instead of having some Dianne Feinstein sitting on Billionaire’s Row telling me that I need to accept some amount of robberies.
Fuck yeah! I’m rooting for you, Frame. Democratize access to police.
Sure². I believe that decentralization and federalism are critical to democracy, i.e. the ability for local groups of people to opt-out of constraints that the rest of society wants to put on them is a good thing, or to opt-in to local constraints that the rest of society decides against. I see one of America's strengths as her federalism, where groups of people do this successfully.
Examples of this that I am hugely a fan of:
* California's stance on non-competes
* California's stance on not treating HIV-positive people differently from other people with STDs
* San Francisco's stance on AI-based policing
* Portola's (a neighbourhood in SF) stance on cars on sidewalks (otherwise illegal in SF) and the Dolores St median parking
At each layer, the group of people collectively decide what makes sense for their society, and then put it into practice.
In my ideal world, this is easy to do at each layer. My least ideal world has an all powerful Commander in (say) Washington DC who decides how people park in Portola.
For most things this is fine, devolution works. For policing, my neighbourhood is subject to the judgment of some person in City Hall who lives in a very affluent neighbourhood. They take my tax money, my payroll taxes, my sales taxes and eat it all. The policing there is far superior to that in my neighbourhood because they use the second currency: power.
I would prefer to just use the first currency: money¹. Every avenue where the first currency is prohibited for outcomes, the second currency takes over. As an immigrant to this country, I don't have the long relations that allow a normal person to have access to the second currency. I am also not Elon Musk or Ron Conway successful and so don't have that avenue to the second currency.
But I do have the first currency. So I would prefer to use the first currency (and the goodwill and first currency of my neighbours) to provide services to the devolved local admin region of my choice.
Policing is currently out of reach but I think it is possible eventually. It just needs some tech and organizational skillwork to get there. After all we already have the Patrol Special Police. It won't take too much work, unless they're too tightly enmeshed.
¹ To be clear, they can continue to eat my taxes. They're the predator, I'm the prey. So be it. I just want to also have some additional services to pay for. They can keep eating my flesh if they want.
² Unfortunately, heavy downvoting will trigger the flamebait filter and I won't be able to respond soon. I'm not complaining about the votes. It's okay to express displeasure that way. But if you happen to want a discussion, I'm afraid you're going to have to email me because I will likely be unable to respond to you soon. That's just how this platform works. I am saying what I am in good faith, definitely not trolling. Also, this comment will have to serve as response to everyone else too for the same reason.
EDIT: Apologies to responders, but I don't want to receive a site ban because I also like to talk about tech. Email me if you want to continue the conversation, or if you want some other public place, go ahead and pick it and we can chat there. Besides, if people are saying "Stop saying what you're saying" then I should be polite and either stop saying it or accept further censure. I'm going to choose the former.
It seems weird to conflate private policing with concepts like decentralization and federalism; which are pretty common in the world (see: Canada, Switzerland, Australia, the European Union, etc etc).
They don't seem related.
I actually agree with you that decentralization and federalism are critical to a functioning democracy, especially in a pluralistic/heterogenous republic, but there are so many questions I have on how pay-for-policing can reliably work.
* What happens when a private police patroller is within proximity of a victim of violent crime that doesn't have the "first currency" and is not a paid subscriber?
* Are the private police authorized to use force? If so, who anoints this power?
I am also a fan of devolution, but it has significant limitations when it comes to policing. Police need more than just local accountability.
There is a fundemental need to trust that non-locals will be treated fairly alongside locals. A lack of fair treatment is already a problem for outsiders and out-groups in this country.
Policing devolution can happen, but it has to be structured in a way to maintain accountability. The concern is that as private security moves into policing, this creates incentives to make our existing policing problems worse.
That's not what's happening here, for a few reasons. The first being that these are mercenaries (or "security contractors" if you want to use euphemisms), not police. Furthermore, nothing is being "democratized" here. They only work for you if you pay them. This has nothing to do with democracy.
Agreed. I really detest how the word "democratize" got buzzed to death. It's become a zombie marketing term, and it wraps familiar ideology with vague associations of a rallying cry. Better phrasing maybe: it's a zombie marketing term that became a persistent and damaging bit of propaganda/ ideological meme.
Even if we allow ourselves to imagine policing as a commodity in the most charitable way possible, what citizen did is still way out of bounds. Rabble rousing an anonymous mob to chase people down is something different from buying security on the open market. I'm against even the most charitable take on private policing because it requires an incredibly childish understanding of society to even take seriously, but these psychopaths are just forming random lynch mobs and should have their funding pulled.
I would hope to god one could make the legal argument that one only submitted to the arrest being under the impression they were police officers, and that they were thus impersonating police. Then sue them to hell and destroy the company.
I don’t see how people can build companies like this or work such jobs. It really stretches the limits of human decency.
This seems like the most important context. Citizen is quite explicitly a vigilante app that promotes vigilantism. The CEO seems to have only pivoted long enough for market traction and still wants to return to the original goal.
This quote could not be any clearer:
> “This is a great transition of Citizen back to active safety. We are not a news company. We are safety and we make this sort of heinous crime impossible to escape from. That needs to be our mindset.”
If this company/CEO isn't stopped, I fear it's only a matter of time before someone (or many someones) gets hurt. Most likely because they "fit the description".
Public safety departments everywhere are in denial how absolutely, utterly, batshit pissed off people are about property crime.
If police never investigate or arrest a single person or do one preventative thing against people breaking into your car, your house, stealing your bike, scamming you on the phone or on the web, taking random crap, no matter how big or small, you're going to prefer vigilante justice.
The police are useless for both crime prevention and crime solving no matter where you live.
> Rampant property crime is basically only a feature of the urban west coast and a maybe handful of cities in the mid-west and east.
Surprise when you live near more people, there's more chance you live near a criminal.
It's all anecdata. I lived in a remote rural area that had like no property crime for over a decade, then a spate of break-ins.
The police do absolutely nothing there too. They supposedly dusted our whole house for fingerprints after the break in and couldn't find a single one, including our fingerprints.
Entire house. not a single fingerprint. After receiving federally-sponsored forensics training they publicly boasted about.
> Someone from SV assumes the whole world is like SV. Water is wet. More news at 11.
> Rampant property crime is basically only a feature of the urban west coast and a maybe handful of cities in the mid-west and east.
> I live in an city most SV techies would sneer at and things don't go missing from my porch or the neighbor's porch.
Ironically, this reads like someone in a well-off neighborhood with no idea what happens in other neighborhoods in their non-SV city.
Everyone "knew" growing up in middle-of-TX town which parts of town you didn't want to park overnight on the street in, or where you didn't want to leave a bike. Even beyond just reputation, you could often tell by the houses - people didn't put chain link around the front yard and bars over the window just for fun.
We can definitely do better -- I'd particularly love to see them start taking death threats on the Internet seriously -- but if people are becoming increasingly incensed despite the fall in the crime rate, it's because their perceptions are for some reason driven by something other than actual facts on the ground. And in particular, there is less of a need for vigilantism, not more.
Hard to tell anything definitive from the reported numbers. It could be that people have given up on reporting property crime. This has been my experience. I know of about 20 car and home break ins in the last few years, none of which have been reported.
I definitely think lack of reporting is at least partially to blame. It's even become an extremely common trope for cop/law enforcement in shows to have jokes and bits that riff off how useless they are with preventing and solving property and theft/robbery crimes.
Anecdotally I had my bike stolen a few months ago and last year my car was broken into and my laptop/dashcam/wallet stolen, and didn't call the cops because as you said I know exactly how useless they are for that kind of stuff.
well part of the problem, in Seattle at least, is that even when they do catch the people responsible, the DA is pressured by the city council and mayors office to generally release people who go on to re-offend. I have friends on the police force in Seattle and they lament that there is no point in arresting certain people for property crime because they just get released. It just becomes a waste of their time with the paperwork and showing up to court for nothing to come of it.
> the DA is pressured by the city council and mayors office
I don't understand this; the King County Prosecuting Attorney was elected, just as the mayor and city council were. Why should any of them be able to pressure the others when they're all 'hired' by the people, not each other? And if the people of King County elect ideologically compromised mayors and city councils, isn't it likely they elect politically compromised DAs too?
I do believe crime is under-reported in this city because it goes unpunished. But I'm just not buying this "DAs as victims" narrative. I think they're as much to blame as the other elected officials.
Next step: Hard to tell if people gave up on reporting stuff because they don't think the police will try or because the police are unable to solve most of the incidents even if they did try.
Seriously though, how are the police supposed to solve most random break-in smash-and-grabs or stolen bike cases? What's the ask here? Constant surveillance of everywhere? Something close-to but less than that? Batman?
I’m simply making the point that property crime may not be going down.
Perhaps people have a valid concern about crime independent of trends that Spurs a desire for these types of services.
Maybe this isn’t the solution, but I think it is unfair to call people batshit because they are tired or scared of having their property broken into, even if it is less than the 90’s
I am just trying to explain the appeal of Citizen and a subsection of NextDoor, the adoption of Ring cameras, etc. You're right, people are mad about something that is falling.
> some reason driven by something other than actual facts on the ground
Maybe Citizen and NextDoor's adoption is made up. I don't think it is. People are responding to something. It's not racism.
It's stuff like the state of Venice Beach in Los Angeles, people getting stabbed to death by homeless people, in their own homes. It's the absolutely insane number of bike thefts in Cambridge. It's the constant scam phone calls to your parents and grandparents. What do you want me to say, that the experience and trauma of getting shit stolen from you can't be reduced to a number? It's a fucking arson. The property crime is ultimately going to be connected to violence.
We are spoiled today by an environment where, if your LTV exceeds the cost of Amazon just replacing your stolen package, sure, it doesn't matter. It is truly a profound awakening for rich people, when they realize that whether or not the credit card company gives you money in a dispute has nothing to do with the merits of what you're saying and everything to do with whether you'll be LTV positive after they pay you back. We are relying on being rich to solve problems rather than solving the crime.
Property crime is a regressive tax on society! Amazon can't afford to replace poor people's packages, because a poor person will never make the money back. Credit cards can't service poor people fairly in disputes. Don't you see that property crime reduction serves poor communities much more than rich ones? They are the ones who can't park their cars in garages, who can't replace the $20 in a stolen wallet. They have more to lose!
This LTV argument is a really good one and one I've never thought much about until you raised it, but reflecting on it, I've seen this at places I've worked at.
> Maybe Citizen and NextDoor's adoption is made up. I don't think it is. People are responding to something. It's not racism.
It is racism, and it's been amplified by news media which selectively report on crimes ("if it bleeds, it leads") and fear-based social media like Nextdoor and local Facebook groups which give a megaphone to every overly suspicious neighbor and self-appointed "neighborhood watch" member.
What's changed isn't the amount of crime. It's the amount of it you get told about.
When you witness and you or people you know fall victim to crime, you don't need to be told about it, there are no media involved, no talking heads with talking points.
Real people are having real crimes committed against them. Wanting a society where that doesn't happen is as far from racist as you can get. The people who stole $9k of my former startup's equipment were just as likely white, anyway.
The LTV point is interesting, and depressingly true. The LTV of a customer is a metric that, before maybe a few decades ago, most companies simply did not calculate. But because today we can use computers to track, correlate, and analyze purchases, we invented the LTV metric, and now it (among others) circles back into how the company treats customers in the first place. If you have a low LTV today, you'll get less support, which means you're unlikely to spend more with them.
Its a pattern depressingly similar to Artificial Intelligence (after all, Elon Musk has made the compelling argument that companies are just AIs of a different form). If you train an AI to predict future possibility of committing a crime based on someone's face, using data of past crimes/arrests/etc, the output will likely, unfortunately, disproportionately rate Black individuals as likely to commit. When deployed improperly, this would lead to increased surveillance and enforcement, more crimes are noticed, more confrontations, accidents happen, and the prediction is suddenly true.
The past does not predict the future; it writes it, and humanity is the pen. The outcomes these predictions promise aren't intrinsically true; they become true because they become recursive inputs into some networked intelligence system, whether that be a computerized artificial intelligence, a company, a government, a market economy, or even humanity as a whole, which then, in adversarial situations, optimizes for self-preservation.
OP specifically said "everywhere". There are surely places where crime is rising. And in all likelihood, the causes will vary with the location, and so must the solutions.
I do believe that it's quite likely that people are angry "everywhere". And much of that has to do with people focusing on being mad about places where the do not live -- not because they're angry on their behalf but because they've been seeking out things to be mad about.
I think that is a total misread of the comment you're responding to.
They're attempting to explain people's mindset, and you've quoted general statistics in response.
When someone has their car stolen, they do not take solace in the fact that, in aggregate, less people in America overall are getting their cars stolen. There is no comfort in this issue generally improving and that they were just unlucky.
Instead, they are responding to the widely apparent increase in police apathy towards enforcing the law against these criminals for these property crimes.
Policing criminals is not just about decreasing statistical crime. It is also about holding together the contract of society where people should not seek their own justice independently. Why? Because historically, people seeking their own justice (aka vigilantism) often do it in an unbalanced and usually cruel manner.
We trust in the state to act fairly and justly when we are wronged by another. Otherwise why should we not seek to harm those who have harmed us? This is the balance that is upset by the perception that the state is not performing its duty to enact justice on all wrongdoings, no matter how they less often they are happening.
> When someone has their car stolen, they do not take solace in the fact that...
But people aren't responding to their car being stolen, are they? They (we?) are usually responding to a story about someone else's car being stolen. Or a story about violent crime against someone we've never met. And that's what the statistics do show - there are disproportionately far more angry people than actual victims.
We're getting outraged because we hear regular stories about unfair things happening to people we've never met.
And I'm not suggesting these events don't matter just because they're happening to others. But it is incorrect to conflate what are effectively random and unlikely events happening to strangers as some sort of unacceptable level of threat to ourselves.
This is a challenge rooted in human nature that I don't pretend to have any solution to. Nevertheless, I think it's fair to reject any of this as an excuse for outrage or the vigilantism that Citizen promotes.
The upward trend is apparent in linear statistics despite a large drop during the COVID-19 pandemic. That said, I do find it hard to believe that people being angry about crime could conceivably coincide with a decrease in the probability an individual crime is reported. Among other cities I checked, Portland also shows an increase, while NYC, Seattle, LA, Chicago, Miami, Atlanta and Boston show declines.
The stats are not helped when police declines to take a report or even come out in Seattle when people steal your bikes or put tents on your front yard.
> 'More recently, the company raised alarm for operating an SUV labeled as “private patrol” in downtown Los Angeles, although company representatives insist the vehicle is not engaged in security work.'
Seems that they really want to be a private security company that augments/replaces the police. I'm morbidly curious as to what would happen if it was allowed to do that.
>I'm morbidly curious as to what would happen if it was allowed to do that.
Probably get sued into oblivion after screwing up. It's really easy to do when you're not the government and can't raise taxes to cover your stupidity.
This is the most likely scenario honestly. I was a security guard while I was in college because it gave me time to study. They were very explicit about NOT engaging with anyone in a confrontational manner. You make yourself seen to prevent stuff walking off of job sites and if you see someone doing something you call the police, period. They didn't want to be sued. They even had a limit on how big your mag-lite could be so it wouldn't be considered a weapon.
'More recently, the company raised alarm for operating an SUV labeled as “private patrol” in downtown Los Angeles, although company representatives insist the vehicle is not engaged in security work.'
I was on reddit and ran across a video that the submission claimed to be of someone poisoning local pets. The video showed someone pouring something on the ground from a distance. We never see what it is.
Later we get a video where the camera person is screaming at the person they are recording. The person just walks away as the camera person follows them yelling.
I was a bit horrified that when I expressed in some skepticism I was meet with a lot of arguments like.
"Why didn't they stop to talk if they're innocent?"
"They didn't deny it."
"You know people really do this."
"You don't have to defend a dog killer you know."
People just took the text claims at face value despite the video showing nothing that it claimed, because they were upset by the claim in the text.
Apps that just have text and a photo, not even an image of a crime, people will believe it whole hog.
A during riots in Minneapolis a local social media apps and sites had rumors spread fast about drive by shootings by people on pickup trucks with assault rifles. These rumor spread several nights in a row despite it never appearing in the news and it being obvious that the previous night's rumors were 100% false.
One city council member spread the rumors of a full on Klan rally in a park with robes hoods and all... a completely absurd claim, folks bought it and spread it.
So back to the app, we have an app whose audience wants to hear this kind of information. That's a scary audience.
I mean this is the same forum that whipped itself into a frenzy trying to track down a random kid they collectively decided must have been behind the Boston marathon bombing.
HN loves to sneer at reddit, but reddit (and HN) is just a microcosm of humanity. If you want to see groupthink/mobs on here, enter any thread about the benefits or drawbacks of cryptocurrencies.
> Everyone deserves a good sneer now and then but I come to HN because people generally look closer / think about second order effects and so on.
Wait until you encounter HN's incorrect hot-takes that get upvoted to top-comment in a niche field you have expertise or personal experience in - especially if it's in a non-tech field. I wouldn't bet on HNs superiority over Reddit, except for a very narrow band of fields. A comment doesn't have to be correct - it just needs to conform to audiences biases in a seemingly cogent way, right or wrong.
Those poor hapless cryptocurrencies, wrongfully accused of murder. I implore my fellow HN participants to please consider the feelings of cryptocurrencies before engaging in vigilante justice against them.
Seriously, maybe some of the criticism of cryptocurrencies here is over the top, but it is not even remotely comparable to what reddit has done.
Did I miss something? IIRC Boston police asked foe help finding the people who carried out the bombing and then found them with the help of the general public. The two individuals did carry out the attack, one is dead and one went to court. Was there more to this?
Feel free to do your own research as the whole process by which this misinformation was created and then spread is pretty well documented. There are quite a few sites and journalists that bear responsibility, but reddit is where it all started.
How exactly does Citizen have any money? Is it all VC funding? There doesn't seem to be any way for a consumer to pay them anything and the app doesn't have ads.
Offering a bounty to locate a person of interest in a crime is not "vigilante justice." The police frequently employ the very same strategy.
Offering a bounty is not a call to attack or harass the person in question; if you want to make that claim, you need more evidence to substantiate it. Right now there's no evidence the CEO wanted anything more than to have this person identified.
> And while Citizen said it plans to get it right next time, Frame suggested in a Slack message that it won’t be the last time Citizen offers a cash reward. “We need to build this into the product and we will,” he wrote.
At least reddit seems to have learned their lesson (both the company and the users).
Yeah, that was one of the worst instances of mob “justice” I’ve ever seen. Innocent people were identified and targeted and investigators were forced to release information about the suspects early, which may have been directly responsible for even more bloodshed [1]. A bunch of internet obsessives playing detective from their keyboards is almost always a bad idea.
As is everything that Vigilante/Citizen is doing. Having the CEO put out a cash bounty, even if it was for the right person (it wasn’t) is gross. Putting out “patrol cars” on the streets of LA when you have no authority is disgusting.
Creating a rent-a-cop as a service model, especially when buoyed by bad data, is quite literally going to get people killed.
This is an absolute disaster. A startup where you give people scraps of allegations and sicing them to go perform acts of vigilantism in exchange for bounties has to be one of the most reckless and idiotic things I have ever heard of. Even if this eventually results in a solved crime, how many other times will it result in innocent people getting piled on for no reason, potentially hurt or killed, or cases against actual criminals being muddied due to interference from vigilantes? There is already countless cases of failures like this from the Internet. Random people are just not qualified to do this kind of thing.
I vehemently oppose this. In fact, I am genuinely pissed off.
I'm genuinely curious how they plan to handle that. Not a lawyer, but this can't possibly be legal, can it? It seems like negligent libel at the very least, and maybe reckless endangerment?
I also can't imagine that the lawyers are unaware, so what's their angle?
What happens, for example, if (or when?) this company gets acquired by a malicious actor? It would've built a user base that bought into its mission statement, actively believes they're making society safer, as well as conditioned to get rewarded for following instructions to do so. What happens if this is weaponized for economic or political gain? This is a recipe for even worse and prolonged events than what's happened on Jan. 6.
Yes, and no. The app depicted in Season 3 is a gig economy app for hired muscle in general, for jobs both legal and illegal. The implication is that the latter is the norm.
I get safety alerts from Nextdoor for my neighborhood. Even then over half of the alerts are misleading/inaccurate interpretations of people's paranoid biases. For example the other day somebody posted a Ring video of a "dangerous man" knocking on neighbor's doors. I recognized the person right away as a pest control representative that was at my house just the day before. Turns out the person posting the alert never answered the door and apparently didn't see the pest control logo on the man's shirt and hat. How they came to the conclusion that someone was "dangerous" based on zero interaction is not only negligent but interestingly is in itself dangerous. Taking that up a notch to vigilantism is a horrible idea and will lead to Ahmaud Arbery types of situations on a much wider scale.
Part of the reason is the utter failure of public security systems in much of the US over the last year - whether it's the riots and occupation of public buildings in Portland or the takeover of city blocks in Seattle (and no one needs a reminder of how bad things are in SF).
> “We are actively working to improve our internal processes to ensure this does not occur again,” the company said in a statement after the release. “This was a mistake we are taking very seriously.”
How about a hefty fine and payment to the person in the order of 30 million paid by CEO personally.
this seems like the perfect use of the corporate death penalty...this is an attitude and philosophy problem that cannot be solved with tools of behavior modification.
It is also one of the least believable statements ever made by a corporate spokesperson ever.
Obviously getting it wrong is a problem--but i think you folks are conflating two issues.
If the FBI had wanted to detain this man, would that have made it okay? What if this app had just broadcast the FBIs own reward?
You're reading into it too much, and acting like people want mob justice.
People have been offering rewards for apprehension or 'information about' for my whole life, and no one thought it was weird. But as soon as a tech company does it, the media goes bonkers. This is another example of the ridiculous axe the nedia wants to grind against anything tech.
I think to take the name of an app and extrapolate that it means mob justice (and not just community watch style activities) is another example of reading into it too much. It sounds like they wanted a catchy name (and its a much better name than the bland 'citizen').
I suppose you can argue that it reveals a true motive that they have since wisened up to.
I think it is relevant that Manhunt =/= vigilante justice and people are widely conflating the two. When the police, family, or NGO post rewards for info, this isn’t vigilantism.
They literally said “hunt this guy down” and “get out there and bring this guy to justice” in their broadcast announcing the reward. They also directed users to a specific location to investigate. Surely you can understand how “hunt this guy down for $30k” is _very_ different from “please call us with tips or information you know for a cash reward”?
> Surely you can understand how “hunt this guy down for $30k” is _very_ different from “please call us with tips or information you know for a cash reward”?
I really don’t see the functional difference.
I don’t think they were calling for people to apprehend or take justice into their own hands.
The words and tone are different, but the request for action is the same.
Presumably law enforcement did want to detain this man, given that they actually ended up locating him themselves and detaining him, and the article is just carefully glossing over this aspect to push a narrative about dangerous big tech companies hunting down innocent people because they've just randomly decided those people are criminals. Like, if they had any evidence that Citizen were responsible for the police's belief that he should be arrested rather than vice-versa, I have a feeling that would be really prominently mentioned in the article.
If you boil this story down to its simplest form it has pretty dystopian implications. A rich tech CEO used his wealth and lynch-mob-as-a-service platform to personally issue a $30,000 bounty on a complete stranger based on nothing more than a picture. It sounds like something an ill-tempered feudal lord might have done 600 years ago. Imagine being on the receiving end of something like this.
For people who find this terrifying and asking how can anything like this exist in a civil society, maybe start with their list of VC investors [0]? Sequoia Capital is ranked very prominently among them.
It's always good to remember that we are not so different from our ancestors. For example, we are very close in time to the people who held the Salem witch trials. What would those same people have done with a high-powered tool that let them find and witch hunt anyone, anywhere on the planet with many more people involved?
I’m always surprised to see that scriptures from 2000 years ago are intelligible for us and do not sound dumb or ultra-simplistic. Similarly, the relationships described in those books are very similar to today’s times. On another topic, when studying historic documents of feminism, I’ve noticed there were the same opposition (and arguments) one century ago and today.
Despite having to recognize the immense _scientific_ progress, the _social_ progress is always touted as immense but I rather have the impression that humans remain as flawed as they were 2000 years ago.
I'm surprised Twitter allowed this company to use its platform to advertise vigilantism, with strong provocation orders such as "hunt down" and "bring to justice", which with vigilante types essentially encourages violence.
Art becomes life.. in "The Circle" a randomer gets chased down and accidentally killed as a "product demo", and in Westworld series 3, Caleb gets assigned vigilante tasks via the RICO app.
Imagine you just got hit by a car. You are lying on the ground. You see a stranger pull up their phone. Are they calling 911 for you? No, they are there to record you being hauled off in a stretcher on perhaps the worst day of your life to be the first to post it online. The Black Mirror writers must have invented this app.
Notifying people of safety issues effectively? Very admirable and wonderful.
Offering bounties to track down individuals as a private organization? It just comes off as rocky to me, perhaps unethical, and ripe for abuse and mistakes.
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